Countermeasure (12 page)

“Sir? Kelly sent me a message letting me know you wanted to see me.” Robert looked up from the contracts he was reviewing. “Yes. I was just going to ring you. Have you finished the investigation?”

Cassandra’s heart vibrated in her chest and she was almost sure that her father could see the shake of it. She swallowed hard to ease the sudden dryness of her throat.

“I don’t know what to say. So far we haven’t located anything other than what we already know. It was definitely an inside job.”

Robert nodded to the chair in front of him. “Have a seat Cassandra.”

Shit,
she thought as she took the chair. She sat tall, her hands folded in her lap, and braced herself. She knew this particular tone of his voice well—they were intimate friends. This was going to be bad.

“Caldwell has requested you be removed from the project. I am turning it over to Jeff Dillon. I should have given it to him in the first place. Jessica and Matt will stay on board. I want you to take a couple of weeks off. Your performance this past month has been…disappointing.”

Cassandra’s heart dropped but she held her emotions in check, hiding behind the shield she had created as a child to deflect her father’s disappointment. At the mention of Jeff, all she wanted to do was crawl in a hole. He hadn’t even bothered to form his own opinion before removing her. It cut her to know that her father truly had no faith in her—even expected her to fail.

Standing, she locked eyes with him, searching his face for any sign of support. There was none. “You know, Father…just once it would have been nice to have you on my side. To have you acknowledge I was doing a good job. This could have happened to any one of us.”

Before Robert could respond, she turned away from him, walked to the door, and stepped into the hall. Closing the door softly, she turned and came face to face with Jeff.

He was her height with a slightly balding head sporting what Jessica liked to call a four-finger-combover that he tended to touch all the time. He was loud, had a big mouth, and loved to intimidate everyone. For some reason, since the day she’d started at James Security, Cassandra had been the focus of his special brow-beating attention.

His tactic was to corner his victim when there were no witnesses around. But he’d met his match with Cassandra. She didn’t take any of his crap—and that pissed him off even more. She knew that one day she was going to lose her patience and whale on him. Today he was dressed casually, but he was definitely wearing his Napoleon complex proudly.

With a smirk, he eyed her and gloated, “Ah, Cassandra. I was just thinking about you.” Looking her over, he then glanced from her to Robert’s office door and back to her again. Lowering his voice he berated her, “I’m sure you’ve heard. Hell, everyone has heard by now that I have to clean up your mess.”

Cassandra’s fist tightened and eyes narrowed. Without hesitation, she brought her arm up, pulled it back, and slammed her fist into his face, knocking his head back and dropping him to the rug. At least, that’s what she imagined as she stepped around him without a word and headed down the hall. Watching as she walked away, he called out, “Send me everything you have. Oh, and tell Jessica and Matt I want them in the conference room in twenty minutes.”

****

Robert sat back in his chair. His heart was heavy. Why was it that he rode her so hard? How did it get this far? Cassandra was a far cry from the shy little girl who pined for her mother. In pain and anger at the death of his wife, he had shut out everyone, including his little girl. At a loss on what to do with her, he hid behind a military regimen, teaching her to be independent and keeping his heart at arm’s length.

With a sigh, he stood, walked to the window, and looked out at the crisp blue sky. For the hundredth time he wondered at what their life might have been like if he had allowed himself to move on. But he couldn’t. There were moments of clarity when he could still smell Cecilia’s perfume. It didn’t help matters that Cassandra was the spitting image of her mother. The same soft brown eyes made it difficult at times to even look at her.

He was proud of her, but could never find the right words to tell her so. It bothered him to see their relationship so disconnected. He had hoped that this job would help them come together as a family. But it had gone to hell. She still did not see him as her dad. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that she called him “Sir” and “Father.” He knew her formality was his own doing and still struggled with how to break down the wall between them. What concerned him more was that it could be too late.

Lately, he had seen her rubbing the scar at her hip often. God, that brought back memories of a time when he thought he was going to lose her, too. It was then he realized things needed to change; however, old habits are hard to break. By removing her from the case, it was his hope that she would have time to work through what was bothering her. Now, seeing her reaction, he realized his mistake. Instead of trying to shield her, he should have let her finish the job. With a sigh, he rested his hands on the windowsill and dropped his head. Hearing a knock at the door he called out, “Yes?”

“Robert?”

Shit, just what I needed,
he thought. “Jeff, what do you want now?”

“Do you have a minute?”

Robert took a deep breath and sat. “Come in.”

Jeff strutted into the room and plopped himself in the guest chair. “I wanted to talk about the case your daughter is turning over to me.”

****

Cassandra walked into the data center. Both Jessica and Matt were already back at their stations.

Jessica looked up and frowned. “Who died?”

“What!? Someone died?” Matt exclaimed in a panic.

Cassandra grimaced. “I think I just did. Robert just told me that Dillon will be handling the project from now on. Dillon wants you guys to meet him in the conference room in twenty minutes.”

“No way! What the hell happened?” Jessica burst out.

“Caldwell pulled me from the project. Apparently, I am incompetent and in need of a few weeks off,” Cassandra responded sarcastically as she sat and stared at her darkened monitor.

“Cassie!”

“Jess, not now. I can’t handle more right now. You and Matt need to go. Finish it. I don’t want you to be casualties of war. Who knows? Maybe this was my fault. My father sure seems to think so.”

“But you said…”

Cassandra cut Jessica off: “I know what I said, but it doesn’t matter. Not anymore. Matt, finish your scan and give the results to Dillon when you are done.”

“What about you? Where are you going?” Matt asked in a small voice, pushing away from his desk.

“Don’t worry about me. Keep doing what you guys do best and you will be fine.” Cassandra sighed, disconnected the external hard drive, and gathered the print-outs of the file logs. “I have been told to relax. I’ll be relaxing, all right.”

Seeing the hurt and determination reflected in Cassandra’s eyes, Jessica walked over and hugged her. “It’s okay, Jessie. I’m fine. Call me later.”

“You know it,” Jessica told her with a last hug.

Cassandra walked out the door with Jessica and Matt following behind her. She waved them off as she headed for the elevator and they headed in the direction of the conference room.

“Kelly, can you tell my father I’ve left?”

“Sure thing, Cassie. See you tomorrow.”

Wrong, Dillon: not everyone knows yet,
Cassandra thought as she passed Kelly’s reception desk and pushed the “Down” button for the elevator.

****

Cassandra arrived at home, climbed straight into bed, curled up, and basically held a pity party in her head before shutting down for a nap. She woke up pissed off, with a “what the hell” attitude. She was now more than ever determined to find Allison and stop her from doing whatever it was she planned to do with the formula.

If this formula made it to mass production by a competitor, a possible lawsuit could be filed against her father’s business—his pride and joy. As much as his condescending attitude made her fume, Cassandra couldn’t let that happen. She needed to get her hands on Allison in a bad way.

With new purpose, she didn’t waste any time. She pulled out the log printouts and started combing through the files again, but this time she focused on all the days since the theft.

Jessica called around nine wanting to meet for dinner, but Cassandra knew she wouldn’t be good company and declined. The truth was, she had been about to trash her desk when her friend called. The logs she had been reviewing for hours taunted her with their secrets.

It was a little after midnight when she finally hit pay dirt. She came across a log that appeared to be missing lines. She then remotely logged into Matt’s computer and located the results of the file size comparison scans he had run. The files were the same size—the differences so minute that the scan alone would never have caught them. But to Cassandra, the small discrepancy was a huge find.

Cassandra’s pulse raced. Her gut instinct had paid off. She was on the verge of uncovering something. Whoever had erased the lines was damn good. A novice would have done the obvious—deleted the entire file. Cassandra’s eyes were caught by an IP number outside the company’s range. The strange IP address only appeared as it left the system a little after 9:30 a.m.—four days after Allison had copied the files.

Performing a quick string search for that number throughout all the files, she found no other occurrence or point of entry into the system. She focused her attention on the logged time immediately before the IP’s exit from the system and noticed small time gaps that spanned a few seconds in length as if lines, containing records of the operations performed by whoever had infiltrated the system, had been meticulously removed here and there. The person had tried to pick up as many breadcrumbs as possible on his way out.

Gotcha…couldn’t sweep that little detail under the rug could you?
she thought, taking note of the IP for further investigation. Finally! She’d found a crumb and was confident she’d soon find the trail.

It had been almost a
week since Trevor’s dead-end intrusion in EXClinic’s server, and not much had changed in his routine. His day began like any other—the usual ride to work, the usual security protocols, the usual daily grind at his desk in the control room. He and his team were almost always knee-deep in data at all times, and that day was no different.

Trevor walked into the control room. George, already sitting at his computer, asked without taking his eyes from his screen, “Hey! How was the ride in?”

“Pretty good, actually.”

“What? No new chapters to add to
The Bike Adventures of Trevor Bauer
? No ‘was almost plowed down on the way in to work’ today?”

Trevor laughed and sat at his desk. “Nope. Today drivers respected the two-wheeled god.”

The lively conversation quickly faded to shop talk and Trevor dove into work without much thought to the past. He was confident that, the same way it had brought one small unknown fact about his father’s work to his doorstep, fate would again present him with another chance to solve that riddle.

****

Cassandra looked out the window, lost in thought, barely seeing the mature landscape bordering the Interstate 295 as Nate drove them to Crypto City. A few days had passed since she found the trail in the logs. Cassandra had managed to trace the IP number to the ranges associated with the NSA. Initially she had wondered if Bristol or EXClinic was under a government-sanctioned surveillance, but there had been no indication of that once she dug further into her contacts, so she’d set her sights on the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Although she had been avoiding Nathan, he was the only person she could turn to for help. Against her better judgment, she had tapped him for assistance, hoping he would be able to use his clearance to get her into the secure building housing NSA operations.

Nathan had eagerly agreed, which hadn’t made her feel any better about the tough conversation she would have to have with him. She had been filled with a rush of adrenaline when he showed her their access confirmation a few days later. She knew then she was getting closer to finding out if any connection existed between the elusive NSA employee and the Morrígan, as well as how the intruder had managed to get into the systems she and her team had so tightly secured.

“Almost there, Cass,” Nathan commented, drawing her back to the present. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cassandra sit up straighter in her seat. Having known her for so long, he could tell by the determined expression on her face that she was mentally preparing herself for the upcoming confrontation.

Nathan pulled up to the gate of the massive NSA headquarters a little after eleven a.m., and showed security their clearance. After the security guard waved them through, Nathan maneuvered the car to the visitors’ parking lot across from the front entrance of the glass-paneled building.

When Cassandra had requested his help, he’d jumped at the chance to be in close contact with her for a few more days. Before she could overthink it like she usually did, Nathan had moved quickly; using his CIA credentials, he had secured their entrance to the building. Bending the truth a bit, he had told one of his contacts at Fort Meade he was working on a classified case and needed to talk to the team managing Echelon data—furthermore, that a civilian security consultant, a former CIA officer, working the case with him would also need access. It hadn’t taken long for him to receive the confirmation that they were a go.